Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. As much as I don't really want to talk about this topic, I really think I need to. And that is a cultural issue in the workplace around the world, which can be best categorized by the word pessimism. And I don't like talking about pessimism because I'm a very optimistic person. And somehow in my life I've developed a sort of a personal resilience to bad things. But not everybody's wired that way. And with all of the problems we see in the political environment, wars, social unrest, and the disruptions of AI, a new report just came out from equilibrium with 5,500 respondents that shows that the number one trend in the workforce is a rise of pessimism. In fact, they call it the rising tide. 67% of employees are feeling worse about the state of the country, the state of their company, the state of their careers, and the state of their lives. And it's particularly acute amongst Generation Z young workers, much more than people my age. And also particularly acute in the industries of government, healthcare, health services, manufacturing, and even in professional and business services. A little bit less in tech, a little bit less in financial services. Now, you know, as far as why this is happening, I think most of you are aware of the pressures that we have. But let me just highlight the way I see it. There's the political stuff, which, you know, affects everybody in a slightly different way. There's the global climate issues that result in various issues that happen at a local level, whether it be a fire, a flood, or some other weather that happens. There's the discussions of the economy, the rising interest rates, inflation, and things that have affected our standard of living, standards of living. There's the impact of AI and the uncertainty of AI. And then there's the job instability of companies making a lot of public statements that they're going to stop hiring, reduce hiring, lay people off, cut people, improve productivity, or doge themselves to health. And you add all that up and then if you're an immigrant, or maybe you look like an immigrant because of your skin color, and in the United States, you see the pressure of that going on and all of the backlash against dei, if that happens to be something that's on your mind, and there's a lot of things to be pessimistic about. So if you read through this report, I'll send you a link to it. It's a pretty exhaustive study of why and where this problem exists. And I don't think we need to kind of debate the problem too much. But the Question is, what do we do about it? And so I want to give you four solutions that I think we have direct impact on in the human resources function and we really need to think about as leaders, supervisors, managers and individuals. The first is what I would call realistic optimism. And this is one of the words they use in the mequilibrium report too. Realistically thinking over time, if you're a student of history, almost everything that's bad that hits your life or your career or your job or your health or whatever it may be that's maybe making you pessimistic passes over time. And there's a lot of Jewish culture around this, but other religions have the same thing.
[00:03:24] That faith and patience and acceptance will give you a sense of optimism. Because we have to accept the things in life that we don't have any control over because they simply are unchangeable by us. And sometimes, Almost like the 12 step dialogue that you have if you go through AA is that if you accept the things you cannot change, you can develop an optimistic outlook. Now in terms of what's going on politically, you know, we are in a very uncertain time. And I think there's people that are, you know, optimistic about that and people that aren't. I tend to listen to historians a lot and most of the historians have been optimistic despite what's been going on in the last administration, this administration about the future of the country. You know, my long term sense of optimism comes from what I call the unquenchable power of the human spirit, which is that every day when I walk down the street and go to the corner, get cup of coffee, go to the gym, whatever it may be, I see people who are doing great things all the time. I see people taking care of their kids, walking their dogs, doing their jobs in a cheerful manner, working hard, taking care of their families, enjoying their grandchildren, whatever it may be. And those are all positive things. So if you get out of the Internet, stop reading the news, stop watching tv, stop paying attention to the political experiences that are going on right now, you see that the human spirit is very positive. Now obviously there's bad actors in every part of the world and it's a very minority part of the population. But I think we as business people really need to show a sense of optimism based on the positive things that are going on in our lives and in our companies. I mean, you all work in companies that have different experiences right in front of you. And I see things going in our company every single day that show me a sense of optimism. Amazing things that individuals do, amazing solutions we've delivered to our clients, amazing relationships and goodwill that we get feedback from, from those of you listening to this podcast or others that we work with, including vendors. So realistic optimism is something that needs to come from the top and we need to embrace. And yes, there are things that go bad, poorly, and yes, there are things that are risky, but that's the reason we're business people, is to deal with that stuff that is, you know, if you don't like that stuff, you can retire and find another thing to do with your time. But every business that I've ever been in has risk. It makes mistakes, There are problems, there are sometimes things that don't go well. But realistic optimism is number one. Number two, eliminate or reduce uncertainty. One of the things that creates things that creates pessimism is a sense of uncertainty. In fact, a lot of the economists have criticized the Trump administration just for the uncertainty. Forget about the tariff policy or whatever else they're trying to do policy wise. The lack of clarity and the lack of consistency in and of itself is disrupting and it gives you a sense of shifting sands and a lack of stability in your emotional life as well as your business life. Now, what does that mean for us as leaders? It means that we need to think, think about where we're trying to go with our groups, our teams, our programs, our investments. Nail that down and communicate it clearly and tell people what's important and what's not important. During a lot of my career, when I was much more junior in my career, when I was always aspiring to do a better job and always worried about how well I would be perceived by others, I don't worry about it quite so much now, but I still do it sometimes. I wanted to know, what should I be doing? What should I not be doing? What do I not know that I need to know? And that's what you can do as a leader or a team leader, is reduce uncertainty. Now, there are people in the work environment that aren't good at this. There are people that create chaos because of their personal style or maybe their ambition.
[00:07:27] And that's, you know, common. And that's always going to happen. But if you're a leader or an executive or a chro, put together a plan, make it simple, as simple as you possibly can. Communicate it visually, communicate it through storytelling, communicate it all the time. I think for those of you that have jobs like me, you can never communicate the same thing enough. People don't hear it when they're upset or worried it goes in one ear and out the others. So coming up with a plan to reduce uncertainty will reduce stress, it will reduce pessimism and increase optimism, and it'll help people produce and have a better life. The third area that I think is really very important during this particular period of time is citizenship. And I've written about citizenship a lot over the years. It keeps coming up at different periods of time. What I consider to be corporate citizenship or organizational citizenship, as me equilibrium calls it, is thinking about your company or your business area or your unit or your team as a good citizen. What are you doing as a business for society? And unfortunately, a lot of companies don't think this way. You know, you know what's been going on at UnitedHealth Group, they're, they're getting sued, all sorts of things are being disclosed about them. I mean, you could go on CNBC or the Wall Street Journal almost every day and read about some bad behavior done by some company or some individual in some company and they're sometimes they're getting sued for it, sometimes they're not. Just yesterday I was reading Wired magazine, which is one of my favorite magazines, and there was an in depth discussion about how Meta, the company that owns Facebook, has been quietly surreptitiously downloading people's browser history from their phones on the Android phones. And they know they've been doing it and they got caught doing it. I don't understand that company. I don't understand why they keep doing stuff like that. There's companies that don't do that. There's companies like Microsoft and others that are very ethical at their roots core. That's one way of creating organizational citizenship. Another way of creating organizational citizenship is doing good things in the community. Thinking about your business in the context of the communities you live in, the communities your employees live in, the communities your customers live in, and the customer environments that you do business in. If you're considered to be a well meaning positive influence on your customers and as customers, but also as their communities, they're going to do more business with you, they're going to refer you, they're going to want to come work for you, they're going to tell you things to make your company better. That's another form of citizenship. And the third form of citizenship is simply listening and taking good care of your staff. We've done a lot of research over the years on trust and you know, trust comes down to a couple of simple things. It's being ethical. Like I talked about in the beginning, it's doing a good job of delivering on your promises and operating in a competent way. By the way, if you're incompetent and you're trying to do something you're not good at, you're probably going to create a level of uncertainty and mistrust. And you know, this is one of the sort of criticisms that comes out a lot about the government is competency. But the third is listening. If you as an organization, empathize, listen, care, you don't have to solve everybody's problems because most people know that the things they're worried about are not solvable by their company anyway. But the fact that the company does care and the company is aware of what's on people's minds, including at an individual manager level, is worth a lot to people. In fact, if you go through any form of counseling, you know that great counselors don't really do much except listen and reflect back what they're hearing. So you feel a sense of empathy and empowerment as an individual. So that's number three or number four is this sense of empathy and organizational citizenship around trust. Now the other thing that comes to my mind when I look at this kind of data and it's all over the place, you know, the Gallup data shows that employee engagement is below what it was in the pandemic. There's another report that just came out of WellHub that's very similar to this is the mequilibrium one. And it's not just true in the United States, it's true in a lot of countries around the world is growth. The thing that I have found in my career, and I think most of the people I've worked with, that gets them out of the negative cycle of thinking is to give them a new opportunity, give them a challenge, give them a chance to learn something, let them try a project or a technology or a tool or a role or get involved in something that's interesting and new to them. Because what it does is it stimulates your mind in a way that you're not thinking about these pessimistic ideas the way you were in the past.
[00:12:21] So, you know, growth is a big topic in companies. And there's a research study coming out now next week or the week after. That's the culmination of our four years of research with Eightfold on the Global Workforce Intelligence Study. And what we did in that research is we did in this was a lot of work for us. We did six comprehensive skills based analyses of hundreds of companies in six industries, consumer goods Consumer banking, healthcare, automotive, pharmaceuticals. And I forgot the last one. Maybe it was energy, I kind of forgot. And we went through the skills and the behavioral data we had from Eightfold and many of the sort of talent intelligence factors they have in Eightfold. And we looked at the characteristics of the top performing companies in each of those industries versus the average and wrote a bunch of research reports on it. And Kathy is just finishing producing the final report that summarizes all six of those industries. And we call those the pacesetters. These are the pacesetter companies. And among the six, five or six companies, major findings, the one that is the most significant is skills acceleration. In other words, those companies that are performing really well are very good at quickly learning new things. And that you can use the word skill or you can use the word learning. It's basically the same idea, is that these are companies that don't just do a lot of training. I mean, that's a little piece of it. But they, they listen, they move people around, they experiment, they innovate in the core, they try new things, they talk to a lot of their peers to get new ideas, they listen to their customers, they value experts, they have a lot of talent mobility and they reorganize in a positive way or reorganization is not considered to be a negative, it's considered to be a positive opportunity for people. You know, I remember this, I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. When I was at IBM and I was fairly young, every year or two I was at IBM, there was a reorg. We reorganized around products, then we organized around company sizes, then we organized around industry, then we organized around products again, then we organized around industries again. And I went through this, you know, six or seven times when I worked there. And one day I went to my boss who'd been around a long time, and I said, you know, how come we keep reorganizing? Doesn't everybody realize that this is very confusing? He said, you know, the reason we do the reorgs because it's good for you. He said, there's a culture on this company that if we're not changing, people are going to get static. And we want people to constantly think about this world differently so that we can adapt as a company. And that's what came out of this pacesetter research was skills velocity. The velocity of change of your company and the ability for your company to change quickly is one of the biggest skills and capabilities you have as an organization. And guess what? That creates optimism. Because when the Company changes and goes into a new area, or adopts a new technology or develops a new product, product that's really cool, assuming that it's reasonably successful. People get excited, it takes their head into a new space and the pessimism goes away. Now, you know, for those of you that are more senior levels, optimism and pessimism is all about mental well being and resilience in your own sense of personal energy. Getting up early, getting enough sleep, going to the gym, going for a walk, standing up and moving around. Traveling with some degree of health associated with your travel, not overworking, listening to other people, being kind to others, spending time with your family, spending time with your kids, checking in with the people that you love. All of those things are part of your personal resilience. Not just nice things to do as a person, but those are all your personal resilience too. So, you know, I know the pandemic was a big lesson on this. Of course, for remote work and all of the, you know, physical risks that we were worried about during the pandemic, we now have another sort of set of constellation of trust factors that people are seeing. And I think, you know, we need to go back to some of the, you know, kind of concepts of wellness and well being that we really all learned during the pandemic to deal with the situation we're in today. I actually do feel, even though I'm very frustrated about the political situation going on right now, I am pretty doggone sure that in a few years this is going to pass and that the resilience and underlying goodwill and well meaning culture of the United States will repair the situation we're in now. And again, even though we have states fighting states and red and blue fighting with each other and so forth, ultimately we live, or I live in a country that is a country of well meaning people. And if you think about why the United States exists at all, the reason the United States even exists is because it was built on a foundation of giving people opportunities to grow and exercise their, their own God given interests and talents in the way that's appropriate for them. That is a very positive philosophy for the United States.
[00:17:30] So even though, you know, this pessimism report just came out, I think there's a lot of arguments that you could make that this is a temporal period of time and we'll come out of it and things will get better. And of course, those of you that want to go to a march or write letters to your congressman, or get involved in social activities in your church or your community of course, you all do all sorts of things like this for yourself, and you get personal satisfaction from that. So, anyway, the reason I bring it up is just to make you aware of this research. It's another idea, or really, it's another role that we play as HR people, as HR leaders, is helping the organization deal with these challenges. And you have many, many of the tools you need to help companies and help individuals deal with these kinds of issues. Okay, that's it for me. We just finished a fascinating CHRO panel with a bunch of 20 or 25 of our CHRO clients and talking about AI and the cultural interests and changes going on in companies around AI. And I'm going to talk more about what's going on in Galileo in the next couple of weeks, because we've got some really interesting things to share there. That's it for now. Have a great weekend. Thanks.
